Superior Sacrifices

Meet Mitch and Marcia: twins, best friends and local celebrities in the small town of Iron Falls, Michigan. Mitch's superhuman dedication to his detective job and Marcia's near-obsessive focus on her family and bookstore business appear ordinary until the secret they've shared for three and a half decades threatens to surface.
"Kellis explores a tight-lipped family's private pain and guilt in a novel that plays out among small-town gossip in the Upper Peninsula."
-Kirkus Reviews

A tale of betrayal, redemption and the consequences of silence by the author of Bookworms Anonymous and The Word That You Heard. This is the story of Mitch and Marcia: twins, best friends and local celebrities in the small town of Iron Falls, Michigan. Mitch’s superhuman dedication to his detective job and Marcia’s near-obsessive focus on her family and bookstore business appear ordinary until the secret they’ve shared for three and a half decades threatens to surface.

A Brief Discussion With the Author:

How did you come up with the storyline for Superior Sacrifices?

One day, I was riding along with my husband in his pick-up truck while he went bird hunting. We went down our usual trails, and then tried one new trail, which lead us through a swamp. All of a sudden, the murder scene entered my head (spoiler alert—stop reading now if you don’t want to know what happens), and I envisioned one boy choking another one, and holding his head under the brackish water until he stops breathing. Somehow, I knew the murderer was the good guy, so I went through my usual line of inner questioning: Why did one boy murder the other? As revenge…for…something the other boy did to the first boy’s sister. Immediately, I knew the victim had just date raped the murderer’s sister. After a Homecoming game. On a rainy night. I could see the entire scene in my mind. The questions kept coming, and I always had a ready answer. This all occurred in my mind, so my husband, three feet away, had no idea. What happened to the sister? She got pregnant, of course. What were their names? Mitch and Marcia. They’re twins. Ooh! And the murder victim was Howard, Mitch’s best friend. What happened to Mitch? There’s more than one town in the Upper Peninsula that boasts a zero murder conviction rate, so I knew this scenario would fit well into the category of homicide deaths that forever remain unsolved. Superior Sacrifices illuminates a dark corner of UP culture that most people who don’t live here never know exists. Before we drove back to the main road, the entire story line was mapped out and the characters had taken up residence in my head. My husband turned to me and said, “what are you thinking about?” “I think I’m going to write a book about twins,” I said.

How did you arrive at the title Superior Sacrifices?

This work wasn’t titled until a couple of months after I finished the manuscript. One morning, over coffee at a campground, my sister and I brainstormed until we came up with this title. It’s a perfect title, using the double entendre of Superior (the Lake, and the synonym for higher) and the word sacrifices, which works into the story nicely. Each character makes some sacrifice, large or small, during the story. The alliteration was a bonus. The cover art is a photograph taken along a Lake Superior shoreline.

Is there really a town called Iron Falls?

Not in the UP. I didn’t want to write a story about date rape and murder in my own town—we don’t need bad karma around here! I located Iron Falls farther west in the UP, so it was more heavily influenced by its proximity to Lake Superior. Lake Superior is an awesome sight to behold—if you’ve never seen witnessed Lake Superior on a calm day and a stormy day, you’re missing out.

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